With the erratic market cost of petroleum-based fuels, electric-only and hybrid electric vehicles have become popular as a means for providing a margin of energy security and economy. Such vehicles have other benefits including noise reduction, emission reduction, and low vibration. Despite the many advantages of electric-only and hybrid electric vehicles, there are still certain areas in which such vehicles are inferior to fuel-powered vehicles. For example, relative to fuel-powered vehicles, electric vehicles generally fall short with respect to driving range. This is generally due to the higher energy density of petroleum fuels compared to the relatively limited energy density of most viable electric energy storage systems, e.g., various types of batteries.
The demands of various auxiliary vehicle systems such as HVAC, defrosting, seat heating, and so on also contribute to the drain of electrical power from the electric storage systems of electric-only and hybrid electric vehicles. It is an object of the invention to provide such a system in various implementations. Nonetheless, it will be appreciated that the invention is not limited to systems that solve all of the problems noted herein. Moreover, the inventors have created the above body of information for the convenience of the reader and expressly disclaim all of the foregoing as prior art; the foregoing is a discussion of problems discovered and/or appreciated by the inventors, and is not an attempt to review or catalog the prior art.